Health monitoring devices are known and used in various fields, including medical instrumentation, personal health monitoring, wireless sensor networks, and computing. Such devices are used for monitoring, recording, and reporting physiological signals. For example, health monitoring devices typically include self-test devices such as weight scales for monitoring a user's weight; blood pressure cuffs for monitoring blood pressure; heart rate monitor for monitoring heart rate; temperature sensors for monitoring skin (or core body) temperature; and Personal Emergency Response System (PERS) devices. Data is typically either retrieved and analyzed as a post recording session or acquired in real-time continuously from the device.
Emergency Alert Systems are known in the field of personal emergency response systems (PERS) and in the field of home security. Emergency alert systems allow individuals to signal for help.
The collection of visualization of data collected from these devices is typically partitioned into 3 components: the device; a network access device or gateway; and an application server. The device typically communicates with the gateway or controller with either a wired or wireless interface such as Zigbee, WiFi, or Ethernet. The data is collected by the network access device or gateway and uploaded to an application server which stores the data and commonly provides a user interface to visualize and report the data.